


atlas

by petasos



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21609268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petasos/pseuds/petasos
Summary: a sort of view of the bubbles, through jade's eyes.
Relationships: Jade Harley & Dave Strider, Jade Harley/Dave Strider
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	atlas

**Author's Note:**

> for jade week, day 5.

When you died, there was no funeral. Far from it, in fact. When you died, there was only silence, not a tear shed, as far as you could see. And memories were blurry, dark and twisted when it came to being turned grimdark by your great-grandmother’s post-scratch self. These were farther things from what you’d expected on the battleship, heading through the Yellow Yard to the next session; you hadn’t ever even considered losing your willpower and falling prey like that. In the end, when you’d died, and woken up to darkness, only Dave next to you, the only thing you could do was stifle a scream.

This wasn’t what you’d wanted.

But then again, who wanted to die? In the end, your death helped serve a greater narrative purpose, filling in the gaps in bones left untouched. Your body, left behind in your timeline, ignored even by the person you’d spent three years traveling with. You wondered if Davesprite and John even mourned you - through all your time in the bubbles, you’d never once found that Dave, that John. The truth was that you were a tool in the prose of life, written out long before you came to exist.

Dave - your Dave - helped you get your bearings together, mumbling about dreambubbles and the afterlife and other things that made sense with context. He’d gotten so tall since the last time you’d seen each other, grown almost a whole foot, scritchy dark blond hairs on his chin, broader shoulders and less freckles than before.

Sixteen.

You’d both died at sixteen.

“I missed you,” he mumbled, pulling you into an embrace, and you just stood there, limbs useless and unwarmed. He wasn’t warm, at all. He was a ghost, and so were you, and there was nothing left to say aside from that. You didn’t know what to say, but you knew what you remembered: emptiness. Darkness. Your limbs moving against your will, taken out of your own body and thrown back into the cosmos, under someone else’s control.

Jade Harley, some remixed version off-beat and synthetic, too many skips and throws from your original self.

And here was Dave, holding you close, tears streaming down his cheeks, falling on your clothes, and your stomach burned, unexplainable feelings pulsing through your body in a way that would take you years in the bubbles to name.

“I missed you,” he repeated, and you could only echo his words, staring into the darkness. When he took off his shades, his eyes glazed over, white through the irises. You’d seen his eyes, once, during your frog-breeding duties, but these weren’t those eyes. These were blank. Like someone had taken bleach to his eyes, poured it through until the color drained out. He sounded like Dave, smelled like Dave down, moved like Dave, had the same scars on the little skin you could see (he’d grown out of his god tier pajamas, and the shirt rode up just a little.)

You just nodded, and listened to him explain. You’d died. Just. He’d died, trying to bring your body to Jane, trying to get her to revive you. Heroic. The two of you had died, mere inches from each other, your blood on him and vice versa, spilling out across everything else like paint spilled across a canvas.

Shakespeare would call it romantic. A songwriter would label it tragic. You wanted to scream.

As a child, your grandfather had taught you very little about the world, but what he had taught you would stick with you until your third death. “Jade, everything you do ameliorates the entire world.” 

It’d been a dictionary later before you learned the definition of “ameliorates”, but when you had, you’d rushed to tell him that you’d realized what he meant. He’d laughed until his face turned red, ruffled your hair, and picked you up to carry you in his strong arms. He’d died a few weeks later, and that was a day you remembered like yesterday, because in your dreams it was the one haunting thing that kept you from moving forward.

When you didn’t dream of Prospit, that was.

Rose being the Seer of Light, counter to your faux-seerhood, had struck a chord in you. You were the Witch to her Seer, when she was the witch and you the seer.

In the bubbles, you never did find your Rose. She’d been taken away, turned into a sprite, and you were left, broken and empty without your Rose, your John - but you had Dave, and he had you, and that was all it took to keep you from losing yourself to the horrorterrors lurking overhead, always in your peripheral vision.

Dave never left your side. Not even when he found his Karkat, his Kanaya. And they welcomed you.

But your grandfather’s words would always ring true: you were the person who was supposed to make the world better, and if you were an Atlas, you were an Atlas.

_But you still had Dave._


End file.
